This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_.
THE CRESCENT MOON
THE IRON AGE
THE DARK TOWER
DEEP SEA
UNDERGROWTH
(with E. Brett Young)
MARCHING ON TANGA
POEMS 1916–1918.
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK
* * * * *
THE
YOUNG PHYSICIAN
* * * * *
BY
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
AUTHOR OF “MARCHING ON TANGA,” ETC.
* * * * *
[Picture: E. P. Dutton logo]
* * * * *
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
881 FIFTH AVENUE
* * * * *
Copyright, 1920,
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
* * * * *
_All Rights Reserved_
* * * * *
_First printing_ _March_, 1920
_Second printing_ _March_, 1920
_Third printing_ _September_, 1920
* * * * *
Printed in the United States of America
* * * * *
TO
THOMAS BRETT YOUNG, M.D.
WITH THE LOVE AND ADMIRATION
OF HIS SON
* * * * *
CONTENTS
BOOK I
CHAPTER PAGE
I. MURDERER’S CROSS 1
II. GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY 16
III. THE GREEN TREES 27
IV. MIDSUMMER 42
V. AIRS AND GRACES 57
VI. THUNDER WEATHER 69
VII. IMPURITY 86
VIII. HOMEWARDS 107
IX. THE DARK HOUSE 124
X. THRENODY 153
XI. THE THRESHOLD 184
XII. THE HILLS 211
BOOK II.
I. THE CITY OF IRON 249
II. MORTALITY BEHOLD 272
III. CARNIVAL 296
IV. SCIENCE 324
V. ROMANCE 346
VI. THE DRESSER 372
VII. THE CLERK 403
VIII. LOWER SPARKDALE 435
IX. EASY ROW 460
X. WHITE ROSES 487
BOOK I
_The green trees_, _when I saw them first through one of the gates_,
_transported and ravished me_; _their sweetness and unusual beauty
made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy_,—_they were such
strange and wonderful things_. _The skies were mine_, _and so were
the sun and moon and stars_,—_and all the world was mine_,—_and I the
only spectator and enjoyer of it_.
THOMAS TRAHERNE.
CHAPTER I
MURDERER’S CROSS
I
ABOVE and beyond the zone of villas, some still white with newly-mixed
mortar and the latest unadorned by more than twelve-foot tendrils of
ampelopsis or rambling roses, the downs bent their bow to the sky. The
horizon loomed so smooth and vast that the plantations of pine and beech
which fringed the summits were powerless to break the nobility and
purpose of its contour, etched gray-black against the hem of a
thunder-cloud that was of the colour of ink. Between the banks a chalk
road climbed: an aspiring road, felted in the trodden parts with dust but
cross-veined with flinty gutters through which rain poured, like London
milk, in stormy weather. A smell of hot earth was in the air. The turf
at the wayside was parched and slippery, so that Edwin Ingleby, plodding
up the slope, was forced to keep to the white roadway by the slipperiness
of his boot-leather. A rather pitiful figure he made, this small boy in
an Eton jacket, his waistcoat now unbuttoned and his school cap crumpled
in his hot hands. He walked and ran straight upward, as though the devil
were at his heels; sometimes looking behind him to see if there were any
one in pursuit, sometimes wiping the sweat from his forehead with the
crumpled cap.
A wagonette, drawn by a pair of horses and burdened with trippers, jolted
past him, throwing up a cloud of chalk-dust that made his eyes smart.
Inside it swayed seven fat women in black bodices. The guard, who was
sufficiently sober, in his own opinion, to ride on the step, was seen to
laugh at the dust-smothered boy in the road.
“Poor lamb,” said the most motherly of the seven. “Wouldn’t ’e like a
lift?”
“Gowing the hopposite way, mem,” said the guard. “One of them College
lads.”
“’Ot ’e looks!” said the lady. “Going to rine kets and dorgs, too.”
Edwin Ingleby rubbed the dust out of, or into, his eyes and went plugging
on to the top of the ridge where the road dipped through a belt of
beeches into the trough between two billows of down, losing itself within
high banks of turf which bordered the plough-land, satiny now with
bearded wheat and infinitely restful. He sat down on the bank with his
feet in the gutter and began to mop up tears with the cap that he had
lately used for mopping up sweat. All the time that he was crying, his
heart was really full of almost incontinent valour, and that was why his
tears made him angry. He began talking to himself:—
“Damned beast . . . great beefy beast. . . . If only the men could see
what a damned beast he is. If Layton or some one could give him what he
wants. Only no one could fight him. . . . He’s got a weak heart, and it
might kill him. I suppose that would be murder. . . .”
The word suddenly got a new significance. They called this road
Murderer’s Cross Road. High up in the grassy bank some pious person had
cut a St. Andrew’s cross to commemorate the murder of a postman who had
been relieved of his bags and his life on a dark night a century ago.
The college tradition said that it was haunted. Certainly it had an ugly
sound. Murderer’s Cross Road: a name to be whispered.
“Funny . . .” said Edwin. “There’s nothing very awful about it. I could
understand a chap wanting to murder a chap. Quite easily. Only he might
be sorry about it afterwards. I wouldn’t mind murdering Griffin.”
He took a silver watch out of his pocket and laid it on the bank beside
him. He could see that there was a full hour to spare before the bell in
the water tower would jangle for the evening roll-call in the corner of
the Quad; and so he lay back easily on the bank, stretching out his legs
and arms in the form of the St. Andrew’s cross scored in the hedge a
little farther on. Lying thus he could watch the shimmer on the bearded
wheat. He had always loved the softness of this dip in the downs. He
had loved it on winter mornings delicately dusted with rime, in November
when flints lay like a bloom on the pale fallow, in March when the bloom
turned green. Now the thunder-clouds had rolled away, rumbling, from the
south, and a breath of cooler air was moving through the valley, throwing
the surface of that green sea into wave-like motion; the waves shuddered
faintly and the sound came to his ears as though re-echoed from the heavy
woods which stood still in the heat, bounding the green ripples; and
lying there, with his eyes half-closed, Edwin was already afloat, bearing
westward with the set of the tide in the track of Cortes and Columbus and
Pizarro and other adventurous voyagers. It was not really very difficult
for him to forget his tears. Although the fear of Griffin, that had
first driven him afield, was a cruel obsession to which he was liable by
night and day, he had long ago discovered that silence and solitude could
make him free of any wonder which he chose to imagine. It had been like
that even when he was quite little; he had always possessed the faculty
of day-dreaming; and now that his imagination was beginning to flush at
the sound of great names, and the pomps of chivalry and legend were
slowly unfolding before him with their subtle suggestiveness unhampered
by such knowledge of detail as would be alive to incongruities, his
idleness became daily more precious. He suddenly remembered that Achaean
assembly stirred by Agamemnon’s words “as when the West wind cometh to
stir a deep cornfield with violent blast, and the ears bow down. . . .”
And now the wind-moved wheat bent like a stricken army before knightly
lances, and the roll of retreating thunder awoke echoes of the guns of
Waterloo. . . .
II
It was nearly three years since Edwin had first seen Griffin, oddly
enough on the very first day of his life at St. Luke’s. Mrs. Ingleby had
come down from the Midlands with him, a little anxious, for there were
pitfalls in public school life (it was in ninety-five), but immensely
proud of Edwin’s entrance scholarship. They had crossed London together
in a hansom, and on the smoky platform at Victoria, she had bidden him a
good-bye which cost her some pangs, for the poor boy was half dead with
train-sickness. Edwin was her only child, and some smouldering ethic
decreed that he must not be pampered, but when she raised her veil to
kiss him, tears escaped beneath its rim. Those tears were very
unsettling; they gave him a sudden glimpse of his mother in a new light;
but he felt too ill even to watch her hurrying to the end of the
platform. His head ached so violently in the sulphurous station air that
he wouldn’t have minded much if some one, say his next-door neighbour in
the train, a city clerk who smoked the most manly tobacco, had relieved
him of the half-sovereign, the last gift of all, that he clutched
mechanically in his left-hand trouser pocket—or if the porters, in the
fine free way they have, had smashed all the jampots in the playbox so
obstrusively white and new, with
E. INGLEBY
115
in black lettering on the lid.
The rest of that journey he had been too prostrate and lethargic to
realise. Somewhere the shouting of a familiar word had bundled him out
of his corner; a porter whom he had tipped fumblingly had bundled him
into a cab which smelt of straw, and at last the martial-looking
personage who received him at the grand entrance had conveyed him up a
broad flight of stone stairs and along a corridor that echoed their two
pairs of foot-steps, to the housemaster’s room, where, in an atmosphere
of mellow honeydew, Mr. Selby sat at his desk, trifling with a bath-list
of the big dormitory. Ingleby sat at one end of a luxurious sofa,
feeling very sick. It seemed as though he could never escape from the
smell of tobacco. At the other end of the sofa sat another boy, perhaps
three years older than Edwin. He was tall for his age and inclined to be
fat. His feet were small and shapely, and their smallness accentuated
the heavy build of his shoulders, so that the whole boy seemed to taper
downwards on the lines of a peg-top. He had a broad face, covered with
freckles, regular but undistinguished features, and eyes, rather wide
apart, of a peculiar cold and light blue. His hair was crisp and sandy;
his whole get-up a little dandiacal within the limits of black and gray.
He kept on fingering silver coins, that jingled together faintly in the
depths of his pocket; perhaps he was counting them in the dark; perhaps
he was merely fidgeting.
Mr. Selby looked up from his bath-list.
“Well, Griffin, and what is your pleasure?”
“Letter from father, sir.”
A letter from father would need an answer. Mr. Selby, although an expert
in the tortuous psychology of parents, was a lazy man. He sighed as he
opened it. “H’m . . . No games? You don’t look particularly ill,
Griffin.”
“Doctor said I was growing too fast, sir . . . something about my heart.”
Griffin’s manners were irreproachable.
Mr. Selby smiled.
“Very well, Griffin, very well. I will speak to the head-master about
you. And who is this miserable weed?”
There had been no break in the drawl of Mr. Selby’s voice with this
change of subject, and Edwin did not hear, or heard without
understanding. Griffin shook him by the shoulder. He lurched forward
like a creature coming out of a cellar into day light.
“Ingleby, sir,” he said.
“Ingleby . . . Oh, yes. Let me see. You won’t need to take the placing
exam. to-morrow because of your scholarship papers. You’ll be in the
lower fourth. So Griffin will look after you. Do you hear, Griffin? I
think Ingleby will be in your form. You are not overwhelmingly likely to
get a move, are you?”
Griffin murmured “No, sir.”
“Then you can conduct this Ingleby to D dormitory, Griffin.”
Griffin whispered “Come on,” and walked ahead down the length of the
corridor and another flight of stairs to a room of immense length, with
whitewashed walls, along which were ranged as many as thirty
red-blanketed beds. Down the centre of the dormitory a trestled table of
well-scoured wood held a double row of wash-hand basins and soap-dishes.
“There you are,” said Griffin, in a very off-hand way. “You’d better bag
a bed.”
“Which one is mine, please?” Edwin asked. His head was aching so
furiously that he could have lain down on the floor.
“I’ve told you, you’ve got to bag one. Don’t you hear? You’d better go
and ask that man over there. Try the next one to his.”
That man over there was a stumpy boy with the face of a hyena and a shock
of black hair, who scowled at Ingleby’s approach.
“Here, get away. You can’t come here. I don’t want any new kids near
me. Keep him to yourself, Griffin.”
Ingleby was thrown violently into Griffin’s arms, and then buffeted
backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between them. This game proved
to be such excellent fun that wherever he sought a bed on which to lay
his things it was continued by his immediate neighbours. He was greenly
pale and beginning to cry when a tall, dark boy, wearing glasses, arrived
and made straight for the group that surrounded him.
“Here’s Layton,” whispered some one.
“What’s this?” he asked. “A new boy?—What’s your name?”
“Ingleby.”
“What’s the matter?”
“They won’t let me find a bed.”
“Come along down this end, then.” He moved majestically to the end of
the dormitory nearest to the door and pointed to a vacant bedstead,
“There you are,” he said. He was kindly without the least trace of
unbending. Ingleby took him for a prefect; already he had received the
canonisation of heroism. He stood and watched Edwin spread out his
nightshirt on the bed. At this moment the climax of his migraine
arrived. Edwin was sick.
Layton’s lips curled. “Dirty little skunk,” he said as he hurried away.
A slipper, cleverly aimed from the other end of the room, caught Ingleby
full on his burning cheek. The pain seemed to blind him.
And a skunk, in spite of himself, he remained, for small boys are as
persistently unintelligent as parrots in their memory for names.
Ingleby’s “skunkhood” became a tradition that he never wholly lived down
during his first years at St. Luke’s. In them he experienced all the
inevitable qualms of homesickness, although even these were more
tolerable than the physical qualms which had complicated his arrival, for
they passed quickly in the excitement of a new life, the adoption of new
standards, the spring of new ambitions. It was a thousand times
unfortunate that he should have made such a sensational débût, that
chance should have included such circumstances as Griffin and a
sick-headache in his first day; for all that was instinct in the boy
rebelled against the category in which he found himself placed, the
definition of his status that had been hastily formulated by a few small
boys, and almost tacitly accepted by the masters.
To begin with, he had very few of the attributes of the skunk. He was
neither dirty nor undersized: indeed he had a nice instinct for personal
cleanliness, and all the slim, balanced beauty of a young boy’s figure.
He was far from unintelligent—though this counts for little enough in the
schedules of precedence at school. It amounted to this: he was not used
to the company of other boys; he had never played games; he had made
himself objectionable on his first night in the dormitory—and Layton had
called him a skunk. Griffin saw to the rest, seconded by the lad with
the hyena face, who bore the illustrious name of Douglas. Strangely
enough no one but Ingleby seemed to have tapped the romance in the
hyena-faced’s name. Setting out to find any tokens of Chevy Chase
beneath the black mop, he was caught staring in Hall, and as a proper
retribution for such insolence, subjected to the pain and indignity of a
“tight six” with a gym shoe, his head wedged in two stocks of Mr.
Griffin’s thighs. New boys of his own age, and smaller, seeing this
exhibition, formed a very low estimate of Ingleby. They shuddered also
at the knowledge that he had been heard to ask the difference between a
drop-kick and a punt.
This isolation, except for purposes of chastisement, weighed heavily on
Edwin. He didn’t wish to be different from others, although he felt that
his mind was somehow of a painfully foreign texture. He knew that things
somehow struck him differently . . . but he was so far from taking this
as a mark of superiority that he was heartily ashamed of it. His whole
ambition was towards the normal; he tried vigorously to suppress
imagination, humour, all the inconvenient things with which he had been
cursed; to starve them, to destroy them. He became studious of the ways
of normality. Griffin and the noble Douglas were handy exemplars;
Layton, the head of the house, an unattainable ideal. Layton, indeed,
was something of a variant; but Layton, by means of his slim skull’s
capacity for retaining facts and an ingratiating piety, had passed beyond
the pale of everyday endeavour. Edwin longed to be normal, and they
wouldn’t let him. He cultivated assiduously the use of the fashionable
slang; and that, of course, was easy. He whipped up an interest in
outdoor games; played his very hardest in the ordinary house football,
and even volunteered to take part in the Soccer games organised on
fag-days for small boys by Mr. Selby, who nursed a lazy grudge against
the Rugby Code. “The Miserable Weeds,” they were called, enshrining his
favourite epithet. But though he plunged out of school every morning to
practise place-kicking in the fields before dinner, Ingleby was not
destined to shine in sport. His habit of dropping off to sleep between
fitful bursts of brilliance almost caused him to be uprooted from Mr.
Selby’s plantation of weeds. This didn’t worry him much, because Soccer
was not popular; but after two trials in the house third, which the
baleful Douglas captained, he was degraded to the scratch side known as
Small Boys; and even here the scrum extinguished a talent that might have
shone in the three-quarter line.
And since he failed in every endeavour to attain normality, whether by
devotion to games or by those attempts which he made to prove that he was
neither “coxy” nor “pi,” by a retiring manner and a foul tongue, he began
to crawl back into his shell, nursing a passionate hatred, not unmixed
with envy, for all those people whom he couldn’t hope to be like. And
so, in a little time, this dangerous humiliation turned to a sort of
pride. It pleased him to count himself their superior even when he was
most downtrodden. His form master had recently been boring the class
with a little dissertation on Marcus Aurelius. Edwin became a Stoic,
spending his days in far corners of the box-room, munching a slowly
dwindling store of biscuits. Once Griffin caught him with his locker
door open and pinioned him against the benches while Douglas made free
with his Petits-Beurres to the rest of the box-room. For such
contingencies as this the Emperor’s system of philosophy seemed hardly
adequate.
Most of all he dreaded the dormitory; for here the abandonment of clothes
laid him open to particularly painful forms of oppression; the shock and
horror of bedclothes ragged just as he was falling off to sleep; the
numbing swing of a pillow, the lancinating flick of wet towels; Oh!—a
hell of a life, only to be terminated by the arrival of Layton, who had
the privilege of sitting up till eleven, with black rings round his
spectacled eyes. He was reading for a scholarship at Cambridge. Then
Ingleby would really get off to sleep, or sometimes, if he were too
excited, watch the moonlight, broken by the stone mullions of the
windows, whiten the long washing-table and cast blue shadows so intense
that they heightened the bareness of the dormitory; or else he would
listen to the harsh breathing of Douglas, who slept with his mouth open,
and wonder what all those heavy sleepers were dreaming of, or if they
dreamed at all. And then his own magic casements were opened.
At St. Luke’s he had discovered the trick—quite a new thing for him—of
historical dreaming. His form were busy with the age of the Stuarts,
under the direction of a master named Leeming, a mild-eyed cleric, rather
shy of boys and feverishly grateful whenever he sprung a response to his
own enthusiasms.
Ingleby drank deep of the period’s romance, and this heady wine coloured
his dreams. He would dream sometimes of the tenanted oak of Boscobel,
watching with agony the movements of the Roundhead searchers; sometimes
he would stand elbowing in the crowd about that scaffold at Whitehall,
when the martyr king stepped out. The man at his left hand had been
eating garlic. Ha!—a Frenchman. One of those musketeers! . . . He
would tremble with delight. He wished that he could tell Mr. Leeming of
his dreams, but they were far too precious to risk being bruised by
laughter or unconcern. All night long this queer panoramic rubbish would
go seething through his brain, until, at six-fifteen, one of the waiters
swung a harsh bell outside the dormitory door and he would turn over,
trying to piece together the thin stuff that its clangour had so suddenly
broken, until the _ten-bell_ rang, and the rush for early school began.
He grew to love the winter terms because the darkness lasted longer.
But he did write to his mother about it. Always on Sunday mornings the
sergeant would come in with a letter from her, full of the strangely
remote news of home; how the garden was looking, what Aunt Laura was
doing, and how they talked of felling the elm-trees in the lane.
Sometimes, with the lavishness of an angel, she would put a couple of
penny stamps inside for his reply. The odd stamp would buy a stick of
chocolate or a packet of nougat at the tuck shop. And in these letters
she rose, quite unexpectedly, to the recitation of his dreams. “How
lovely it must be for you,” she wrote. “When you come home for the
holidays at Christmas we will read some of Scott’s novels
aloud—_Waverley_ and _Nigel_, and that will give you something more to
dream about.” He began to realise what he hadn’t seen before: that his
mother was really a wonderful playfellow—much better, when he came to
think of it, than any of the boys. He would have so much to explain to
her. . . . “Oh, you dear, you are lovely!” he wrote in reply.
And then one day, that sneak Douglas, fooling about in the dormitory with
Edwin’s toothbrush, happened to see the words that were faintly printed
on the ivory handle:—
INGLEBY, CHEMIST, HALESBY.
“Oho,” he said.
At breakfast, after a propitiatory but futile helping of jam from Edwin’s
pot, he broke the glad news to Griffin.
“Ingleby’s father’s a chemist, Griff.”
“Then that’s why he’s such a skunk, Duggy. Is it true, Ingleby?”
“Yes. He’s a chemist.”
“Then he isn’t a gentleman.”
“Of course he’s a gentleman.”
“Not if he’s in trade. They oughtn’t to have sent you to school here.
It’s a bally shame.”
That same afternoon Edwin was poring over a letter at his desk in Big
School. His mother always told him to keep her letters. “Some day you
may like to look at them,” she said. He was reading this letter for the
tenth time to see if he could extract some last scrapings of the
atmosphere of home which it had brought him.
“Who’s that letter from? . . . Girl?” said Griffin rudely.
“A lady.”
“What!”
“My mother.”
“Christ! Your mother isn’t a lady, or she wouldn’t have married a
chemist . . . or be your mother.”
And then Edwin jumped up, overturning the form on which he had been
sitting, and lashed out at Griffin’s face. He wanted to smash the
freckled thing. He only caught the boy’s cheek with the flat of his
hand, and then, after a second of dazed wonder at his own achievement, he
rushed out of Big School, across the Quad, and up that white, dust-felted
road to the downs.